London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 4

by Henry Mayhew

Of Prostitution in ancient Greece.

In the heroic ages of Greece, we find women—on the authority, indeed, of poets, the sole historians of those times—enjoying a considerable share of liberty, held in much respect, accustomed to self-reliance, and allowed freely to mingle with others of their own sex and with men. A modest simplicity of manners is ascribed to them, which is wholly foreign to modern ideas of refinement. What education they received is not well known, though they appear to have been trained to practise many of the useful as well as the elegant arts of life; but with respect to the morality prevalent among them little exact information can be gained. As in the Bible, however, frequent allusion is made to harlots and strange women, waiting at the corners of the streets, so in the poets of antiquity, passages occur which point to the existence of a class, dedicating itself to serve, for gain, the passions of men who could not afford marriage, or would not be bound by its restrictions. The science of statistics, however, does not seem to have been cultivated in those days. We are not told with certainty of the population of cities, or even whole countries, and men were not then found to calculate how many in a hundred were immoral, or to compare the prostitute with the honourable classes of women.

With the commencement of the strictly historical age, though statistics are still wanting, there have been collected materials from which we may gather fair ideas of the status of women, and the position and extent of the prostitute class among them. Beginning with Sparta, a very peculiar system displays itself. Among the citizens of that celebrated Doric state, women were regarded as little more than agencies for the production of other citizens. The handsome bull-stranglers of Lacedæmon held exceedingly lax notions of morality, and would have considered a delicately chaste woman as one characterized by a singular natural weakness. Taught to consider themselves more in their capacity of citizens than of women, their duty to their husbands, or to their own virtue, occupied always the second place. Their education inculcated the practice of immorality. All ideas of modesty were by a deliberate public training obliterated from their minds. Scourged with the whip when young, taught to wrestle, box, and race naked before assemblages of men, their wantonness and licentiousness passed every bound. Marriage, indeed, was an institution of the state; but no man could call his wife his own. On occasions when the male population was away in the field, the women complained that there was no chance of children being born, and young men were sent back from the camp, to become the husbands of the whole female population, married and single.

GREEK DANCING-GIRL—Hetaira: Age of Socrates.

[From “Costume Antico e Moderno.”—Milan, 1616.]

In times of peace, also, the public laws gave every woman a chance of becoming what we should in these days term a public prostitute. A man without a wife might insist on borrowing for a certain time the wife of another. Should her husband resist, the law was called in to enforce the demand. It is asserted, indeed, by some, that adultery was unknown in Sparta. There was no such offence, in truth, recognised in the code. It was common, legal, and occurred every day. At the same time, however, it is to be remembered, that the severe laws of Sparta, recognising no concessions to the weaker passions of men, allowed these things only for state purposes, that citizens might be brought forth. There appears to have been no class of prostitutes gaining a livelihood by selling their persons to the pleasures of men: the rigorous code of the state forbade such sensual indulgences. Women were not allowed, apparently, to walk the streets. The young were strictly watched by the elders, the elders jealously observed by the young; and any proneness to a practice subversive of that vigorous health in the population, considered essential to preserve the manhood of Sparta, would have been denounced as an attempt to introduce luxury and effeminacy—the vices, in their eyes, of slaves. To assert that in the whole state no virtuous women, and no public prostitutes, in our sense of the word, could be found, would be rash; but it is certain that no authority which has come down to us represents chastity as a Spartan virtue, or prostitution for money, or from predilection, one of their social institutions.

In Athens a wholly different picture is presented. There, and generally among the Ionians, the duty of the wife was to preserve a chastity as delicate and pure as any which is required in our strictest social circle. There, at the same time, the courtezan class existed, and men of all descriptions and all ages encouraged prostitution, to which a considerable class of women devoted themselves. This is a complete contrast with Sparta.

The young girls of Attica were early trained to all the offices of religion; they acquired considerable knowledge; their intellectual qualities were to some degree developed: they were educated to become housekeepers, wives, and mothers, such as we describe under those heads. Exercising considerable influence over their male relatives, they possessed consequently considerable weight in the community, and altogether held a higher position than the women of Sparta. They led secluded lives, yet they enjoyed many opportunities of intercourse with the other sex; and though, in their theatres, and in their temples, indecency of the grossest description was frequently displayed to their sight, they seem otherwise to have been somewhat refined in this respect. In Sparta, the virgins never hesitated to expose themselves naked before any circle of spectators: in Athens they observed at least the public forms of decorum, and, with the exception of the Hetairæ or prostitute class, were sufficiently modest in their conversation and in their behaviour.

Accustomed to be present at public spectacles, to converse with men, to share in the performance of ceremonies at religious or civic festivals, the women of Athens occupied a position somewhat approaching that which we believe is proper to their sex. Marriages, as among us, were contracted, some from sentiment, others from interest. We are led to form a high idea of the general morality prevailing in the Attic states of Greece at an early period, from the exalted view of love, of chastity, of matronly duties, urged in the writers of the time. This seems a fair measure to employ, since, in a later age, when morals were more corrupt, and the regular class of prostitutes might be confounded with the general society, the style and sentiment of poets and others formed an exact reflex of the prevailing state of morality.

Traditions point to a period in the social history of Greece, when men and women dispensed altogether with the ceremony of marriage, living not only out of wedlock, but promiscuously, without an idea of any permanent compact between two individuals of opposite sexes. If such a state of things ever existed, it must have been before any regular society was formed, and it is therefore vain to dwell upon it. Polygamy, we know, long continued in practice among the Greeks, though it was a privilege and a propensity chiefly followed by the powerful and rich. In Athens marriage was held sacred. The character of a bachelor was disreputable. So, indeed, was it in Sparta, where young men remaining single after a certain period might be punished for the neglect of a duty exacted from them by the severe laws of the state. In both states, but in different degrees, the prohibition of marriage within certain limits of consanguinity extended; but when once the union took place, it was, in Athens, a crime of great enormity to defile its sanctity. The influence of the wife was, in the household, powerful; and commanding, as she did, the respect of men, the advantages of her position were so great, that to risk their loss by a transgression of the moral law, was not a common occurrence. We may therefore assign to the women of Athens a high average of morality, and consider them as having been held in remarkable estimation.

An important point in the manners of every people is the institution of marriage. From an inquiry into its estimation, whether it be held a religious rite, or a civil contract, or both, with various other circumstances in connection with these, we are aided in forming a just idea of the prevalent civilization. In the Doric states of Greece, it was esteemed as little more than a prudent ceremony, binding man and woman together for purposes of state. As among the savages of Australasia, it was the custom for a man to bear a woman forcibly from among her companions, when he took her to the bridesmaid’s house, and, her hair being cut short and her clothes changed, she was delivered to him as wife. His intercourse with her however, was, for some time clandestine, and he shunned being seen in her society. This was the case with the wealthier maidens. The portionless girls were, from time to time, shut up in a dark edifice, and the youths, being introduced, accepted each the woman he happened to seize upon. A penalty was imposed on any one refusing to abide by the decision of chance.

Occasionally public ceremonies were enacted at the marriages of the rich; but from all testimony it appears certain that the union of man with woman at Sparta was entirely of a civil, and by no means of a sacred character. Private interest, sentiment, and happiness were indeed, in this, as in all other matters, subordinate to the public exigencies. When a woman had no children by her own husband, she was not only allowed, but required by the law to cohabit with another man. Anaxandrides, to procure an heir, had, contrary to all custom, two wives. The state excused no licentiousness for its own sake, but any amount for a public object[23].

In Attic Greece, the ceremony of marriage was viewed in a more poetical light, and divinity was supposed to preside over it. We have already alluded to the notion of the promiscuous intercourse among them at a remote period; but, passing from this fable, we find traces of polygamy long discernible. Heracles maintained a regular seraglio. Egeus, Pallas, Priam, Agamemnon, and nearly all the chiefs, possessed harems, but these were irregularities, contrary to law and custom, and only in fashion among royal personages. The story of the two wives of Socrates seems a pure invention.

In the Athenian Republic, marriage, being held in reverence, was protected by the law. In the later and better known ages, consanguinity within certain limits was a bar to such union. Men, however, might marry half-sisters by the fathers’ side, though few availed themselves of the permission. Betrothed long before marriage by their parents, the young man and woman were nevertheless allowed on most occasions to consult their own inclinations. Numerous religious rites preceded the actual ceremony, and heavenly favour was invoked upon it. The marriage was performed at the altar in the temple, where sacrifice was made, and a mutual oath of fidelity strengthened by every sacred pledge. Adultery was held a debasing crime, and divorce discreditable to man and wife[24].

In connection with the subject of marriage is that of infanticide. It prevailed among the Greeks, under the sanction of philosophy. Among the Thebans and the Tyrrhenians it was, however, unknown. Why? Because they were more humane, or moral? Not by any means. They were among the most profligate societies of antiquity. It is generally shame which induces to child-murder women bearing offspring from illicit intercourse with men. Where no disgrace attaches to illegitimate offspring, the principal incentive to destroy them is taken away; and in Tyre, where female slaves served naked at the table of the rich, and even ladies joined the orgies in that condition, modesty was by no means a common grace of their sex.

The Thebans, a very gross people, made infanticide a capital crime; but allowed the poor to impose on the state, under certain circumstances, the burden of their children. In Thrace, the infant, placed in an earthen pot, was left to be devoured by wild beasts, or to perish of cold and hunger[25].

In Sparta, clandestine infanticide was a crime; but the state often performed what it declared a duty, by condemning weakly and delicate infants to be flung into a pit. In Athens, on the contrary, it was left for desperate women, and cold-blooded men, privately to accomplish the act, exposing their children in public places to perish, or to claim charity from some wayfarer. Frequently the rich had recourse to this, for concealing an intrigue, and left a costly dowry of gold and jewels in the earthen jar where they deposited the victim. The temple steps sometimes received the foundling; but occasionally they were left to die in desert places.

In the flourishing period of the Republic, however, poverty was so rare, indeed so unknown, that it seldom exacted these sacrifices from the humbler people. Infanticide was then left to the wholly unnatural who refused the burden, or the guilty who dreaded the shame, of a child.

But in the female society of that state, there was, as we have said, a sisterhood which exercised no inconsiderable influence on public manners. These were the Hetairæ, or prostitutes, who occupied much the same position which the same class does in most civilized communities of modern times. The youthful, beautiful, elegant, polished, and graceful, commanded, while their attractions lasted, the favours and the deference of wealthy and profligate young men, and, when their persons had faded, sank by degrees, until they dragged themselves in misery through the streets, glad to procure a meal by indiscriminate prostitution, with all who accepted their company. When children were born to them, infanticide usually—especially in the case of girls—relieved them of the burden.

The position the prostitute class of Athens occupied in relation to the other women in the community was peculiar. They entered the temples during the period of one particular festival—and in modern countries the church is never closed against them; but they were not, as among us, allowed to occupy the same place at the theatre with the Athenian female citizen. Yet this was not altogether to protect the virtue of the woman; it was to satisfy the pride of the citizen, since every stranger suffered an equal exclusion from these “reserved seats.” Notwithstanding this, however, the courtezans occasionally visited the ladies in their own houses, to instruct them in those accomplishments in which, from the peculiar tenor of their lives, they were most practised, while it appears that both classes mingled at the public baths.

The Hetairæ, or prostitute class, exercised undoubtedly an evil influence on the society of Athens. They indulged the sensual tastes and the vanity of the young, encouraged among them a dissolute manner of life, and, while the power of their attractions lasted, led them into expensive luxury, which could not fail of an injurious effect on the community. The career of the prostitute was, as it is in all countries, short, and miserable at its close. While their beauty remained unfaded they were puffed up with vanity, carried along by perpetual excitement, flattered by the compliments of young men, and by the conversation of even the greatest philosophers, and maintained in opulence by the gifts of their admirers. Premature age, however, always, except in a few celebrated cases, assailed them. They became old, ugly, wrinkled, deformed, and full of disease, and might be seen crawling through the market places, haggling for morsels of provision, amid the jeers and insults of the populace.

In some instances, indeed, there occurred in Athens what occasionally happens in all countries. Men took as wives the prostitutes with whom they had associated. Even the wise Plato became enamoured of Archæanassa, an Hetaira of Ctesiphon. For many of these women were no less renowned for the brilliancy of their intellectual qualities than for their personal charms. Of Phryne, whose bosom was bared before the judges by her advocate, and who sat as a model to the greatest of ancient sculptors, all the world has heard. Her statue, of pure gold, was placed on a pillar of white marble at Delphi. Aspasia exercised at Athens influence equal to that of a queen, attracting round her all the characters of the day, as Madame Roland was wont to do in Paris. Socrates confessed to have learned from her much in the art of rhetoric. Yet these women, harsh as the judgment may appear, were common whores, though outwardly refined, and mentally cultivated. Instances, indeed, of high public virtue displayed by members of that sisterhood, distinguished among the Hetairæ of ancient Greece, are on record, and sufficient accounts of them have been transmitted to us to show that they were among the male society a recognised and respected class, while by the women they were neither abhorred nor considered as a pollution to the community. Still, prostitutes they were, to all intents and purposes.

The mean, the poor, and faded, were chiefly despised for their ugliness and indigence, not for their incontinence. It was, in the Homeric ages, as we learn from the Odyssey, held disgraceful for “a noble maiden” to lose her chastity. But in Athens, at a later time, chastity in an unmarried woman was not held a virtue, the loss of which degraded her utterly below the consideration of all other classes, or debarred her for ever from any intercourse with the honourable of her own sex. The Hetaira was not, it is true, admitted to mingle freely in the society of young women; but she was not shut out from all communication with them; while among men, if her natural attractions or accomplishments were great, she exercised peculiar influence. Consequently, it appears that in Athens the superior public prostitute had a status higher than that of any woman of similar character in our own day. If we look for a comparison to illustrate our meaning, we may find it in many of the ladies who at various periods have frequented our court—known but not acknowledged prostitutes[26].

In the public judgments of Athens we find, it is true, a penalty or fine imposed on “whoredom,”[27] from which, however, the people escaped by a variation of terms, calling a whore a mistress, as Plutarch tells us. Solon, however, recognised prostitution as a necessary, or at least an inevitable evil, for he first built a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos, which, truly rendered, means Venus the Prostitute; and his view was justified by the declaration that the existence of a prostitute class was necessary, in order, as Cato also thought, that the wives and daughters of citizens might be safe from the passion which young men would, in one way or the other, satiate upon the other sex. Though procurers, therefore, were punishable by law, and the Hetairæ were obliged to wear coloured or flowered garments, it was enacted in the civil code of Athens, that “persons keeping company with common strumpets shall not be deemed adulterers, for such shall be common for the satiating of lust.”

Brothels, consequently, existed in moderate numbers at Athens, and the young men were not discouraged from attending them occasionally. There were also particular places in the city where the prostitutes congregated, and a Temple of Venus, which was their peculiar resort. We find in the poets passages, indeed, advocating the support of whores[28].

Still, respected and beloved as the Hetairæ were among their friends and lovers, recognised by the law, and protected by it, general public respect was denied them, for the Athenians estimated above their brilliant charms the modest virtues of inferior women[29].

One of the most remarkable features in the public economy of Athens was the tax upon prostitutes, introduced also in Rome by Caligula. It was annually farmed out by the Senate to individuals who knew accurately the names of all who followed this calling. It is to be regretted that their statistics have not been furnished to us. Every woman, it appears, had a fixed price, which she might charge to the men to whom she prostituted her person, and the amount of the tax varied according to their profits. Apparently, they were principally “strangers” who filled the ranks of the Hetairæ, for we find that if persons enjoying the rank and privilege of citizens took to the occupation, a tax was imposed on them as on the ordinary prostitutes, and they were punished by exclusion from the public sacrifices, and from the honourable offices of state. The same writer informs us, on the authority of Demosthenes, that a citizen who cohabited with an alien paid a penalty, in case he was convicted, of a thousand drachmas, but the penalty could not often have been enforced, as the laws of Solon recognised prostitution; it was a feature in the manners of the city, and brothels were fearlessly kept, and entered without shame. Numerous evidences of this have been supplied us[30]. To preserve a respect for chastity, however, and to inculcate a horror for the prostitute’s occupation, the same code allowed men to sell their sisters or daughters when convicted of an act of fornication, which, in Athens, as elsewhere, frequently was the first step in the regular career of these women[31].

The dishonour thus accruing to the general body of prostitutes, though a small class of them enjoyed many superior advantages from their wealth, and the polish of their manners, served at Athens, in some degree, to preserve public morality. The system never seems to have reached the height which it has gained in many of our modern cities, where married women often follow the occupation, and live upon its gains[32].

In Corinth, however, prostitutes abounded, and the Temple of Venus in that city was sometimes thronged by a thousand of them. They were usually the most beautiful women of the state, presented or sold to the temple, who prostituted themselves for hire. They were of a superior kind, admitting to their embraces none but men who would pay munificently, and in this manner many of them are said to have accumulated large fortunes[33].

Tabular statements, and numerical estimates, have been wanting to complete this glance at the system in ancient Greece; but it may, nevertheless, afford a just idea of the extent and character of the prostitute class there.